


Who's Got Who

by scioscribe



Category: The Hateful Eight (2015)
Genre: Dom/sub, First Time, Intercrural Sex, M/M, Mildly Dubious Consent, Period-Typical Racism, Post-Canon, Riding Crops
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-04
Updated: 2017-11-04
Packaged: 2019-01-29 14:01:17
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,667
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12632523
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Warren makes inventive use of Mannix's sheriff star.  And, for that matter, inventive use of Mannix.He thinks that will be the end of it.





	Who's Got Who

**Author's Note:**

  * For [linndechir](https://archiveofourown.org/users/linndechir/gifts).



> Happy Yuletide!

All in all, the butcher’s bill:

About a dozen people killed, some of whom he’d halfway liked, only three of whom he was so aw-shucks pleased to see dead that he might have judged their bloodshed worth the price.

A decent little way-station shot to shit.

One hell of an ugly raised scar up in the crease between his right thigh and his balls, the nearest miss he’d ever had.

Two months of bed-rest spent watching his cash from all those bounties leak out into doctors’ and innkeepers’ hands like water from a sponge, three months more than that hobbling around with a cane and feeling older than the fucking hills. Five months in all in Red Rock, a nothing little mining town with bad food and worse company.

The company being, for the most part, Chris Mannix, who got all his own walking practice dragging his bum leg up and down the hall between his room and Warren’s until he lost the limp for good, who kept falling asleep in Warren’s only chair like his skinny ass was the best thing that’d ever happened to it, who couldn’t stop running his gawping hillbilly mouth.

“Why the hell are you here all the time?” Warren asked him one day, when he came out of a thin, feverish sleep to yet again see Mannix sacked out in the armchair like he’d gone and gotten himself possessed by Sweet Dave’s ghost. “The other day I came to and half-mistook you for a piece of fucking furniture.”

Mannix was unruffled. “You’d be the one hanging around me if _you’d_ woken up first and _I_ wasn’t there.”

Warren laughed. “Mannix, I wouldn’t hang around you if we were on the same damn gallows.”

“But you did,” Mannix said, pointing at him, the rest of his hand still curved around his whiskey glass. His grin was stupid, but not as stupid as Warren would have liked it to be. “And when it came time for hanging, we pulled that fucking rope together, didn’t we?”

“We did.” That was a memory still rosy enough to make him feel warm all the way down to his toes. “I’ll give you that much.”

“Well, there you go,” Mannix said, like he’d proved something, and he passed Warren a drink. It was harder to quarrel with him when he had their pitiful share of liquor at his elbow and had a generous hand in pouring it.

Mannix got free booze as a perk of actually being the for-real elected sheriff after all; Red Rock was pissed about having gotten him only partway capable and seemed to think that if he were drunk off his ass all the time, he’d stay still and let his leg heal up quicker. It was Warren’s opinion that people who handed out civic responsibilities through the mail to men they’d never so much as met deserved whatever they got from it, and, though he didn’t say it, he guessed they could do worse than Mannix. A couple bottles of whiskey a week seemed fair, with that in mind.

(“I mean, some of it’s for you anyway,” Mannix said. “We both did make the papers, you know. Somebody scrounged up an old daguerreotype of you, actually, major.” A scowl. “Nothing of me because I didn’t go around burning men alive.”

“No,” Warren agreed, “I guess about every fire you set wouldn’t have drawn many newspaper boys, especially not down in your neck of the woods.”

The scowl changed to a frown, almost but not quite a puzzled one.)

If they’d met some other way, he thought sometimes, he’d have killed Mannix without a second thought.

And if they’d met some other way still, he might have done something else.

“Did you ever think of trying for the price on my head?” He asked the question in between hands of poker. “I know you spent enough time looking at the picture of it, recognizing me right away like you did.”

“Bet you were flattered,” Mannix said, flicking one corner of a card back and forth with his thumb. “Bet you anything you were.”

“If this game’s any indication, you’d bet _anything_ on a pair of fucking twos.”

“No, I never did,” and for a second, it sounded like he was talking about the twos, his voice was so casual. “I ain’t one to back down from a fight, but when I hear some black motherfucker’s roasted pretty damn near ninety men alive, I say, well, that’s a black motherfucker you just might want to give some breathing room to.”

“Being you prefer to save your fighting for black folks less likely to fight you back,” Warren said.

For something like half a second, Mannix looked like he didn’t like the sound of that so well now that he was hearing it out loud, but it was a pretty short half a second. Then he got that especially rubbery, especially half-witted smile he got sometimes, the one that never quite matched the look in his eyes. “Major, I could have sworn we agreed way back even before Minnie’s that we just weren’t gonna talk politics.”

“Sure,” Warren said, closing his eyes. “You figure out a way the two of us can cozy up together in some brotherhood-of-man bullshit, you let me know.”

“That’s a cakewalk, major. We just find some _other_ asshole we can _both_ hate.” He paused, and it felt like a longer pause than usual, maybe because Warren’s eyes were still closed so he had nothing to look at. “Why’d you ask, anyway? You wouldn’t have done me like you did the Smithers boy, would you?”

Warren opened his eyes, a pleasant silvery meanness taking his mind off the pain sitting down between his legs like a hot coal. “No, I barely heard of your daddy, white boy. John Ruth had to nearabouts give me his whole biography before I recognized your name.”

“So you’d have shot me plain and simple.”

“Now you’re putting words in my mouth,” Warren said. “I never said anything about plain and simple. I just said it wouldn’t be like it was with Chester Charles Smithers.”

“Well, I don’t want to freeze to death,” Mannix said, though his cheeks had those high little pink circles on them like men with frostbite got. “I mean I don’t want any part of any of that.” He said it like Warren killing him was some supper dish on a menu, something he could get fixed up however he liked, with or without gravy, with or without him down on his knees in the snow. He said it with that bred-in-the-bone cracker confidence that meant not enough had ever happened to him that he hadn’t asked for.

So that was one more price he’d had to pay, in the end. Five months of Chris Mannix’s bullshit. Worst of all, probably, had been the parts he hadn’t even minded.

By the time Warren was healed up enough to feel he could make the ride out in one piece, Mannix had been playing at lawman for a couple of weeks. It gave him some peace and quiet during the day even if Mannix persisted in coming back each night to perch by Warren’s bed and chatter on like a mynah bird. He always sat in the chair at such an angle that the lamplight hit that tin star of his just right to shine into Warren’s eyes.

He knew he was planning on heading out the next day, and that made him reckless. He did always like burning a thing to the ground when he left it.  Why should this be any different?

“Bring that over here,” Warren said, gesturing at the star.

“You can get up and get it your own self,” Mannix said. “You’re healed up enough for that.” But he stood and brought it over anyway, proud as a mother cat with a kitten, and put it right down in Warren’s open hand.

Warren tilted it back and forth. He couldn’t get the light to gleam in quite the same way. He closed his fist around it and stood up, almost standing straight into Mannix, who took an immediate step back. Warren smiled.

He said, “Lie down there.”

Mannix’s own smile was tight, forced. “Major, you’re not making any sense.”

“I’m making plenty of sense. As a matter of fact, I’m answering a question you wanted to know the answer to—whether I’d have done you like I did Chester Charles Smithers. What’s your middle name, anyway? In case I wind up in hell having to tell your daddy about all this.”

“I think my daddy would know who I was even without it,” Mannix said. “I was the only Chris. So that’s all you’re getting, major, sir.”

Warren shook his head. “That’s not all I’m getting by half, white boy. Now, like I said. Lie down. Face down.”

“How do you think you’re gonna make me?” His voice was so low it had a strange texture to it, the accent thickened somehow, napped up like velvet. “You ain’t got a gun on you. Not even a knife. What’re you planning on doing, major, breaking a bottle of whiskey over my head if I don’t do just like you say?”

“I don’t need a gun or a knife to get you on that bed, Chris Mannix.” He held up the star. “All I need is this.”

“Shit,” Mannix said. “That does it. You’ve convinced me.” He showed his teeth, and since there were lot of them to show, it wasn’t half-bad as far as it went. But it couldn’t outweigh the sweat up on his forehead or the way, for that matter, he was letting his own pistol lie in its holster all nice and cozy.

“Walk away from it if you don’t want it,” Warren said, shrugging. “But you do want it. This little piece of tin’s just about the only thing you ever got for yourself, isn’t it?”

“I got _you_ ,” Mannix said. His breathing had thinned out, turned almost to a whistle. He was hard, which surprised Warren not at all.

“No, Chris. You get nothing but the bed, and only that because I’m feeling friendly, on account of all the shit we waded through. But _I_ got _you_ , and you know it. You know it up here,” tapping his own forehead with one sharp point of the star, “and you know it down _there_ ,” and no prize for guessing where his hand went then, where Mannix’s eyes watched it go. “So lie down for a little while, and when you get up, you’ll be able to pin this shiny little star back on yourself. But you’re not wearing it now. You ain’t sheriff of anything right now. You’re the son of Erskine Mannix of Mannix’s Marauders and you’re gonna get on that bed.”

“You can’t,” Mannix said, but he was already drifting toward the mattress. His legs knew what was happening just as much of his cock, never mind if his head was clueless. He eased onto the bed and, very slowly, rolled over onto his belly.

Warren ran a hand down his back and he shuddered.

“Sure,” Warren said. “Pretend like that, like you don’t like this at all.”

“I saved your _life_ , damn you.”

He hooked his thumb hard into the side of Mannix’s neck until he was certain he’d left a bruise. “I saved yours first.”

He slid the star around the nape of Mannix’s neck, down onto the bruise, and then up onto his cheek; it was sharp enough to cut him a little with it and Mannix made a thick kind of gasp. That was about all Warren wanted in the way of preliminaries, or at least about all he could stand, so he got Mannix’s pants shoved down, got that dead-pale ass of his on display. Mannix had his head down on the pillow. Warren reached around in front of him before he did anything else, and damn if he didn’t bring Chris Mannix off within a minute. Warren liked that. Not just the flattery of it, though he _was_ flattered, but he liked Mannix knowing how plain he’d made it that he liked it, and he liked that now Mannix had no real incentive to cooperate besides just wanting down at his bones to do what Warren told him to. Good. Let him not have any hard-cocked haze to dull his knowledge of what he was letting get done to him.

His hand slick with Mannix’s stuff, he rubbed it down his cock and then pushed up between Mannix’s thighs, moved him around, shoved his legs together, changed the angles of him, like all Chris Mannix was was some hinge to be oiled exactly right.

He thrust up against him, against his balls, against that soft cock that wasn’t getting anything out of this anymore, and he thought, _You have to nail it shut. Two boards, one won’t do_.

No, no, it wouldn’t. There was no containing anything anymore. The storm had blown everything wide fucking open.

“Here,” he said, forcing the star back into Mannix’s hand. “Keep your eyes on that. And whenever you stick it on in the morning, you keep this in mind. Who’s got who.”

“Yes, sir,” Mannix said, so softly Warren at first thought he’d misheard him and then knew, with an unwelcome kind of certainty, that he hadn’t.

So he spoiled his own fucking fun, and he didn’t even know why: he closed his hand around Mannix’s until neither of them could see the star at all. That was when he came—just like that. His hand so tight around Mannix’s that he could almost feel their bones creaking.

Mannix was panting, or maybe he was, or both. He pulled away and put himself back together, knocked Mannix down over onto his side. His come was all over Mannix’s cock and balls, the imprint of his thumb on Mannix’s neck.

Slowly, Mannix opened his hand and showed the star.

“There you go,” Warren said. “Like I promised. You got it back.”

He meant to kick him out, but he didn’t, somehow: they just drank themselves to sleep, Mannix curled up in the armchair with his sheriff’s star balanced on the arm, no longer reflecting the light at quite the right angle, no longer quite so shiny.

To the extent that he could put a thought together by then, he figured he wouldn’t wake up in the morning—that he would wake up only to the extent that Mannix put a bullet in his brain and sent him down to open his eyes in hell. Maybe good old Erskine would tell him Mannix’s middle name if Mannix himself wouldn’t. But the morning came the same as it always did, and since he was the one who woke up first, he was the one who left. He took everything with him, and he told himself he’d never come back, that he would never want to.

Outside it was early summer and warm. So there, he thought, breathing in the smell of fresh grass and wildflowers, horseshit and hay: the winter had gotten its pound of flesh out of him. All done now.

* * *

 

Except then he didn’t leave.

* * *

They refrained from talking about it. For a few days, they kept away from each other altogether, which was no mean feat in a piddly little town like Red Rock.

It felt like the war all over again, and not the part of it he’d liked—this was the long wait to see where gunfire would kick off, the slow days when you scouted out the enemy and knew he was doing the same to you. There was a kind of poisonous equality in all that, because neither side knew for sure what would would happen. The best part of the war hadn’t had shit to do with equality—it had been when the balance tipped to all those white Southern crackers going around with holes in their boots and air in their bellies, when the Union’s edge on them had been like a hatchet-blade resting against their necks. The best part was them knowing he was winning; him knowing they knew. He got little tastes of that beforehand when he was locked in on some white son-of-a-bitch and it was musket-against-musket, sword-against-sword, and body-against-body; he could always see that look come into their eyes when they realized that he was better and that he had no mercy.

He’d been good at killing Indians, too, but shit, it just wasn’t the same. He never got hard doing it and he never dreamed about it afterwards.

He supposed that was the appeal of having Chris Mannix in his bed, now that he thought about it. Because Mannix had had that same look in his eyes all the while. Mannix had known, all through that, which one of them was better, had known that never mind his sheriff’s star and his pasty skin and his Southern drawl, he was lucky as a three-legged dog to get Warren’s cock up between his legs, up against his bare skin.

Maybe that was why he was still around. Pretty much everybody else who’d known him of late had been shot by some Domergue, and circumstances didn’t permit him having quite as many chances nowadays to make sure some white man got a more accurate idea of his place. In that regard, Mannix was economical, good for both liking and hating.

It was a bad habit to get into, fucking a white man who liked it, and an even worse habit for him to like that Mannix liked it, but hell, at his age he was entitled to a few bad habits.

That felt like a decision, so he made it one: went into Red Rock’s only restaurant at the height of suppertime. Fuck Mannix for thinking he owned the regular dinner hour anyway.

Mannix was sitting at a table by himself looking like some kid who’d gotten all his marbles kicked away, and damn if he didn’t brighten when he saw Warren’s direction.

Warren sat down opposite him.

Mannix raised his glass in an ironic little toast and then took a drink. “And here I would have said you were avoiding me, Major Marquis.”

Warren shrugged. “Some while back, I got promised a sit-down dinner, booze included, on account of I gave some blue-lipped motherfucker a ride.”

“I think we both know that wouldn’t have been _your_ call,” Mannix said. “Don’t tell me anything about me being sheriff would have made _you_ do anything other than leave my ass out in that blizzard if you’d been the only one in that coach.”

“Might have dragged you behind it a while, except I suspect it would’ve offended OB.”

Some of the polish left Mannix’s face—whatever he had rehearsed for them ending up face-to-face again wasn’t this. “Goddamn Joe Gage, I still say he didn’t need to do that. OB didn’t even pack any fucking iron.”

“I don’t think they were overly particular.”

“No.” Mannix took another long drink and then wiped his mouth off with the back of his hand. “What about you, major, you overly particular?”

“About killing?”

“Or anything else.”

He knew what that meant. “Maybe a little more than that bunch.” Enough he wouldn’t have killed OB, or at least enough that he wanted to believe he wouldn’t have, just out of some notion of who was in the battle and who wasn’t. But not enough that he wouldn’t have killed John Ruth, if it had come to that or if Ruth had been between him and something he wanted badly enough. And John Ruth had been almost a friend. “And you, Mannix? You particular about your bloodshed?”

“Not as such,” Mannix said. Watching him contemplate morality was like watching a horse trying to learn how to spell: you figured he wasn’t gonna get very far, but you were surprised it’d even come to him to make the attempt. “Except I guess I didn’t kill you and you didn’t kill me and here I am buying you a steak dinner, so there’s that.”

“I ain’t seen you place an order yet.”

Mannix scowled at him and then heaved himself up to go over to the kitchen and call inside with instructions, not even waiting now for the girl to come out and wait on them. Steak and potatoes and whiskey and pie. He might have asked what Warren wanted, except that was all that was on the menu, so Warren had to be fair about it. He didn’t have to be fair about anything else, though.

Mannix dropped back down into his chair. “You satisfied? And you know you got everyone in here staring at us?”

“I suppose if you mind it that much I could tell them a thing or two that’d make them stare even more.”

“I guess you would. Being in the habit of announcing shit to all and company in the middle of a haberdashery that ain’t a haberdashery. Why’d she call it that?”

“I don’t know,” Warren said. “I always meant to ask, but I never did.”

Mannix regarded that statement for a moment and then, when their drinks arrived in the middle of it, raised his glass again, this time not with a smile. Warren clinked it.

Then Mannix pissed all over whatever goodwill he’d just accumulated by saying, “See now, that proves we can be friends, doesn’t it?”

Warren gave that comment the response it deserved, which was to almost waste good whiskey by spitting it out in amusement.

“I’m not saying we got to write each other love letters, send each other locks of our hair. Not that you got so much of yours left anyway. I’m just saying, you know. Something respectable.”

Something that didn’t involve Warren doing what he liked with him, didn’t involve him coming so hard his knees had buckled just because Warren’s hand was on him, was what he meant, Warren could tell, so he said, “Something your daddy would be proud of.”

Mannix’s lips stiffened. “I don’t know what you’re think you’re talking about, major, but I guess I thought you were smart enough to work out that my daddy would have parted ways with me just for waving you over to sit down at the table.”

“So you’re a hero, is your way of looking at it. Righteous to the core.” His tone made it clear exactly what he thought of that idea.

Then their dinner came and Mannix tore into his steak like he was just bound and determined to attack something. Warren contented himself with eating in a civilized manner. It was pretty good steak for being from the only restaurant in town.

Mannix was going about things all wrong—he thought he was already good, already good and getting better, and that what he had to make sure of was that Warren knew he was a man, and not the kind of man who liked the idea of another man’s dick. But the fact was, him being a man was about the only part of him Warren was sure of, the only compliment he could pay him. He was steady in a fight and he had a kind of loyalty to him and he’d shed the last stupidity that belonged exclusively to a little hero-worshipping white boy back at Minnie’s. What he wasn’t, and couldn’t be, was good. That was one fruitless fucking quest right there. And self-righteousness didn’t suit him.

But whatever Warren had signed up for by coming inside and pulling up a chair, it hadn’t been Chris Mannix’s moral education. He was no damn Sisyphus. Mannix would figure out who he was or he wouldn’t, and in the meantime, there was no reason for Warren to give a shit so long as it didn’t interfere with what he wanted.

“This steak’s all right,” he said.

Mannix looked at him warily. “Best and only steak in Red Rock.”

“Civic pride, that’s cute. You figure you shine up about as well as that star?”

“I figure either way, you like looking,” Mannix said, his voice low, and that was the end of it.

Mannix had gone and bought himself a shitty little house in the intervening days—Warren was almost impressed that he’d accomplished that much without tripping over himself—and it was there that they went that night. Mannix probably figured it gave him some kind of pitiful advantage, but as far as Warren was concerned, all it meant was that he was marking up Mannix’s place like he’d marked up Mannix himself, like he’d marked up his sheriff’s star. By the time this was all over—and damn but he hoped he got this out of his blood soon—he was going to own Chris Mannix right down to the ground. There’d be nothing in Mannix’s life he could look at without seeing Warren’s fingerprints.

Never mind the bed. He got Mannix down on his knees just inside the door and he took his dick out and stroked it up, Mannix swallowing dryly as he watched. Warren supposed he hadn’t really gotten a good look before. This time he was content to let Mannix linger on the sight—linger and realize that he still wasn’t standing up.

“If I asked how much cock you’ve sucked over the course of your life,” Warren said, “would I get an honest answer?”

“I don’t—you’re not—”

Warren laughed and ran his thumb across Mannix’s lower lip. “You just realize you got to either admit you’re a good cocksucker or tell me I’m deflowering you?”

“You’re an _asshole_ ,” Mannix said, and then Warren put his hand around around Mannix’s chin and pushed his mouth open, his thumb at the hinge of Mannix’s jaw. Mannix went and held the pose, too, because evidently waiting for his mouth to be filled was preferable, in this one case, to figuring out what he’d have to use it to say.

He ought to make him. He knew he could. Why he didn’t, he didn’t know.

But fucking Mannix’s mouth was a good enough way to distract him from thinking. Mannix was all hot neediness, open for him except where he seemed to know without being told that Warren needed him to do the work, and then he did the work well. No fucking deflowering here. It made him thrust harder, deeper, made him cradle the back of Mannix’s head so Mannix could take just about all of him. There was something red and black behind his eyes when he closed them, something he couldn’t parse. He could have finished himself off thinking about Mannix on his knees with a line of soldiers waiting for his mouth, true or not, but what right did Mannix have to do it? What right did anybody else have to do what Warren was doing now?

Like his fingerprints should have been on Mannix already, like they should have been there before they’d even met.

He came and Mannix spat, which Warren wouldn’t have liked ever and was in even less of a mood to abide right then. All the more because his best guess would be it hadn’t even come naturally but had been some pissant little act of defiance.

“That’s not right,” he said, his voice calm. He tapped his fingers against Mannix’s cheek, not hard but not too light either. “And I think you know better.”

Mannix looked up at him, suddenly doubtful, suddenly smart enough to be a little nervous. “Major?”

Warren glanced around the room and figured fortune was smiling on him—he could have made do with anything or nothing, but he felt his smile grow wide and warm when he saw the riding crop Mannix had let fall beside his other pair of boots. He must have taken it from the livery without meaning to. Or, hell, maybe he had wanted this. Warren wouldn’t put it past him.

“Where’s your bed?”

“I can get off right down here,” Mannix said stubbornly. “Anyway, I ain’t invited you to stay.” He frowned. “I think I like you better when we’re killing and not fucking, major.”

That delighted him almost as much as spotting the crop. “Likewise, white boy. Now you go and get your clothes off and get on your fucking bed, wherever the hell it is.”

“Yes, sir,” Mannix said, which was something Warren could have listened to all day long.

He gave Mannix a minute or two to accomplish the task and then another minute or two to feel gooseflesh start to rise on his skin, to feel cool night air on his hard, hot cock, to realize how little he understood what he’d gotten himself into, and only then did he come in. Leather glove on his right hand, right hand firmly gripping the crop.

Mannix’s eyes got as big as saucers when he saw it and he made the kind of moan that was halfway to a groan even as he pushed himself back on his knees a little, putting his ass even closer to Warren’s hand as he came around the bed. But that was Chris Mannix all over: never knowing which fucking way he thought was up. Which was why Warren had to make it clear as crystal to him.

Though at least Mannix had known enough to get on his hands and knees. Since Warren was no fucking frisky and bushytailed nineteen year-old to have taken his mouth in one room and his ass in the other with only five minutes in between the two, he must have known he wasn’t getting fucked, but there he was all the same. Waiting for what he knew was coming.

“Major—”

“ _Chris_ ,” Warren said, “did I say we were holding some kind of fucking symposium here on what was gonna happen or not happen?”

Mannix sighed a rattling kind of sigh, his breath catching at such regular intervals that it might as well have been notched, like a ruler. “No, sir.”

“You like this?” He trailed the flat little leather keeper up Mannix’s left leg, knee to thigh to just beneath his balls.

“No, sir, I don’t.”

“How come I don’t believe that any? Aside from your face being as fucking red as it is.” He flicked the crop against Mannix’s ass and felt an unexpected and unwelcome pride at Mannix knowing better than to yelp at it. “I ain’t got all night for this, I asked why I don’t believe you.” Three smacks in quick succession.

Mannix ducked his head down. “Because of— _fuck_ —because of how hard my fucking cock is.”

“Then you see why I got to give this to you, since you’re all but fucking begging me for it.” Ten along the backs of Mannix’s thighs. Mannix _did_ make a strangled kind of noise at that, and Warren was so perversely relieved that he’d fucked up that he almost rewarded him for it; moved the crop between his legs and brushed his balls with it, made that sound turn into another low moan. “I mean, you hear how you’re begging me for it.”

“Yeah, major.”

He liked what followed just fine. He made nice use of that crop on Chris’s white ass, taking a pause every now and then to stroke it along his cock in the cruelest fucking tease he could think of, and when he reckoned Mannix had had enough, he kept on a little longer just because he could. Part of him wanted to know if Mannix would break and make another sound again, but he didn’t, so at long last Warren dropped the crop down by the bed. He rolled Mannix over onto his sore ass—that won him a low hiss of pain he liked almost as well as he’d liked the beating itself—and put his leather-gloved hand on Mannix’s cock.

Mannix tried to close his eyes, but Warren said, sharply and with a squeeze of his hand, “No, you don’t. You watch yourself, you hear me?”

“Yes, sir.”

So then Warren watched _him_ —watched him watching himself getting off by the same hand that had whipped him. He was pink all over, flushed with exertion, and Warren took his eyes off him only to lean forward and kiss the sweat off his mouth, off those blowjob-swollen lips. Mannix came right at that instant, which had to be, Warren thought smugly, pretty fucking humbling for him.

He leaned back, wiping his hand down Mannix’s thigh. “Is it too much to hope that you learned anything from that, Mannix?”

It was about the only time he’d seen Mannix unreadable, and Mannix went all the way in on it, indecipherable as the fucking Sphinx, until without saying a word he reached over and took hold of Warren’s cock and rubbed his thumb across the head of it. Warren didn’t suppose there was much of anything left there, as far as come or even spit went, but it was the gesture of thing, of Mannix’s callused thumb there and then the way Mannix, still not speaking, brought it back to his mouth and licked it.

“So you’re smarter than I thought,” Warren said, ignoring the corkscrew-twist down inside him. “I’ll say that much.”

“I guess I follow the ways of the company I keep,” Mannix said, which was a fucked-up compliment but a compliment all the same.

Warren didn’t see the rest of the night improving on that any, and he was in the mood to go to sleep, but when he stood up and started putting his gunbelt back on, Mannix eased himself up on one elbow and said, “You can stay.”

He held his hand around the belt buckle for a moment and then undid it. “Might not be a good sight for innocent townsfolk, me walking out of your place at two in the morning, especially not looking satisfied with myself.”

Mannix tried to frown but couldn’t make it all the way there, he was as sheepishly proud of himself as if Warren had pinned a blue ribbon on him.

It was the first time they’d shared a bed in any kind of ordinary way, and he couldn’t say he thought as much of it as he did of the fucking. Mannix tossed and turned like he was trying to live through a shipwreck and he seemed to be stuck at the temperature of a furnace. Warren finally pushed him all the way over to the edge by the wall and let him nuzzle up against the uneven boards, and that won him at least a few hours of sleep before a dream woke him sometime close to dawn.

Chris had rolled over on his side and was looking at him steadily. “Domergue?”

“What?”

“I thought I should wake you is all. You were talking.”

So it’d been Mannix who’d gotten him up, not the dream, whatever it had been. “I’m surprised you don’t talk in your sleep, come to think of it. You talk every other minute.”

Mannix was nonplussed. “Gotta give it a rest sometime, don’t I? You sure as hell wouldn’t want my mouth tired out.”

Warren snorted. “You spin around like a fucking weathervane.”

“Well, this morning I feel sunny.” He stretched, winced, and turned over onto his stomach; wriggled his hips a little until the sheet slipped down.

Warren tugged it the rest of the way and admired his handiwork. He said, “I don’t know what you’re smiling about. Pretty as I’ll admit you look,” and he traced one especially pink welt, “you didn’t have anything to do with it.”

“The hell I didn’t.”

“Nobody credits a canvas for a masterpiece getting done to it.” But he yielded, because now that the dream had slipped away, he felt sunny enough himself; it’d been some time since he’d gotten laid so well. He stroked Chris’s ass with his whole hand. “I’m surprised you even spent part of last night on your back.”

“Mm.” Chris closed his eyes, like he even half-deserved the petting he was getting, which just wasn’t so. “I ended up all the way over against the damn wall somehow.”

The dumbass really didn’t seem to have a clue, which was more endearing than it should have been. He went back to the welts, touching each one in turn. “These are coming up nicely.”

“I can’t get my head back enough to see.”

“Good, because you’re vainglorious enough and I don’t know why I’m indulging you about it.” After a bit, he saw a little more reason to it, because Mannix liked the praise enough that he got more and more shameless about it and in a better and better mood, till he knelt down by the bed of his own accord and gave Warren a nice enough good-morning blowjob before he headed out to work.

Warren was tempted to go out on the porch and watch him go, half to see if it would spoil Mannix’s morning and half just to get one last good look at his ass, covered up though it was, but the risk wasn’t worth the reward: get caught standing on another man’s porch on a morning like that and good taxpaying folks would see smoke and start looking for fire. He had another cup of coffee instead. Sitting at Chris Mannix’s kitchen table, go fucking figure.

It was, he figured, about time he left to kill some men and make some money. Mannix didn’t have still enough waters to run deep and so Warren guessed he knew him well enough to know there’d be no real reward for sticking around, not that day; put a little distance between him and the afterglow and Mannix wouldn’t think so highly of what he’d let get done to his backside. Warren was too old to deal with any of that. He could just barely make himself sit through Mannix wandering dumbstruck around the idea of developing scruples, taking little pauses he seemed to think qualified him for sainthood; he drew a line in the sand at putting up with anything else.

He left a note before he could talk himself out of it, though.

 _Be back_ —which was all he needed to say. It would be enough, if Mannix was who Warren thought he was, to say that. Let him read between the lines, he was irritatingly good at that anyway. Be back when you’ve got your head in order so you’re not too much of a pain in the ass. Be back when I’ve talked myself out of being sensible. Be back when I can be halfway sure that I won’t have to cuff you to the bedframe to keep you still once you get back to thinking about your daddy. Be back when, as fucked up as it is, I want to see you again, or at least see a couple particular looks in your eyes. That kind of thing.

Then he drew something underneath, in lieu of signing his name. A star.

Let Chris Mannix look at _that_ of an evening and dwell on it, and Warren had no doubt that when he came back a couple weeks from now, he’d be able to do just about anything he liked. It might even put him in a mood to be generous.

He’d say, “Guess I’m glad I didn’t burn you down after all, Chris Mannix.”

And Mannix would grin that stupid grin of his and say, “Well, you _tried_ , major, but I just wouldn’t catch.”

Warren shook his head, already incredulous at what hadn’t even happened yet, and tapped that little penciled sheriff’s star like he was saying goodbye to it. See you later, anyhow. He moved one of the liquor glasses over to the corner of the note to hold it down so there’d be no chance it’d blow away.


End file.
